Internet

This is the best argument I have seen for Internet regulation. It was also an insightful and humorous piece of writing about adtech, privacy, surveillance and other stuff. Yes, it is longer than most people's attention span, but worth the read.

"There's a myth in Silicon Valley that any attempt to regulate the Internet will destroy it, or that only software developers can understand the industry. When I flew over to give this talk, I wasn't worried about my plane falling out of the sky.

"Today, nearly 40 percent of American households either do not have the option of purchasing a wired 10 Mbps connection or they must buy it from a single provider. Three out of four Americans do not have a choice of providers for broadband at 25 Mbps, the speed increasingly recognized as a baseline for broadband access."

The discussion revolves around - surprise - arbitrage! There would be investment IF there was enough money in last mile residential; if regulation was lighter; if, if, if.

So the FCC set the clock on the Charter-TWC merger. Part of the order explains how confidential information will be handled. (This is not the first merger with confidential company info.) The two Republican Commissioners on the FCC are complaining loudly -- as they have over every order passed by this Commission. FCC Commish Ajit Pai is often belittling the FCC CHair and his decisions publicly.

And that is the consumer stuff filled with social and real time communications. What about the business customers Internet Traffic? What does it consist of? How much of it is real-time comms (voice, video, conferencing)?

During a CEO Exchange at the FISPA Live event last week, the discussion among the CEOs turned to TV service. Many in the room were primarily residential ISPs or CLECs, all of whom offered Internet. The discussion was about the cord-cutting's effect on the TV model.

As I have explained before, cablecos have it the best - they went from TV service, which is the least profitable to Internet and voice, which are the most profitable services to offer consumers.

As pricing on bandwidth declines, it is having a ripple effect on the whole system. Bandwidth prices have been in decline but the last couple of years the megabits per dollar has really dropped. The more you buy - 1GB or 10GB - the less it costs now. [Which makes the whole inter-connection fight that Comcast and Verizon have had with Level3, Cogent and Netflix seem like nothing more than posturing with consumers caught in the middle per usual.]

One reason is simple data logic. "That database suffers from the classic, timeless data-management problem of "garbage-in, garbage-out" -- they can't give accurate info if they don't get it to begin with.